It’s Friday…
Ahem…
I mean Frightday…
And I have some recommendations for you to enjoy this weekend…
Okay…
This Frightday’s theme is…
A Fistful of Characters.
In 1990…
Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery arrived in theaters…
The intense, intimate interplay between the characters in this film…
Added not only an elevated level of tension…
But an overwhelming sense of empathetic claustrophobia, as well…
The audience was able to have a more narrowed, almost laser-like focus on the events depicted on-screen…
Without the distraction of a vast array of secondary characters…
Or the never-ending parade of extras…
And just like it did with this film, and the films that I am recommending to you…
That experience brings the audience that much closer…
That much deeper…
To what is unfolding before their eyes…
Especially when that minimalist cast…
Is trapped within the confines…
Of a horror movie.
So, let’s take a chronological look at the best, most frightening, and possibly even unknown to you, Horror Movies with a Fistful of Characters…In the years following Misery.
Them (a.k.a. Ils 2006) – This French-Romanian production tells the tale of a French couple Lucas and Clementine who’ve recently moved into a sprawling country home in Romania…What this film lacks in gore…It makes up for with a heaping helping of dread, tension, and fright…Throughout the course of this celluloid nightmare…This couple is relentlessly tormented…For no fucking reason…And us poor hapless assholes in the audience just keep on hoping that they will find some way out of it…But…When the big head-spin comes…It is not only when we discover who their tormentors are…But also…When you remember that you were told in the opening scene that this whole sordid mess is based on a true story…It was a fun and totally messed-up ride…One I highly recommend that you take.
1408 (2007) – Here’s a Stephen King adaptation that is often forgotten…But not by me…John Cusack plays Mike Enslin…A writer who is a surprisingly cynical skeptic…Surprisingly…Considering the fact that he writes about the supernatural…The next haunted place he is going to write about, is a room within The Dolphin, a hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York City…The room bears the selfsame number as the title of the film…And the hotel manager, played by Samuel L. Jackson, does his level-best to convince Mike that staying in that room is a bad idea…But Mike lets his skepticism take the wheel…And stays in a room that usually convinces its inhabitants to commit suicide in less than 60 minutes…Sort of reminds me of this little Motel 6 that I stayed at, just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska…But that overwhelming urge to throw myself into oncoming traffic was due to boredom, lack of alcohol, countless cockroach roommates, the door adorned with a small, torn, left behind piece of caution tape, and a far-from-empty waste basket, that for the previous inhabitants, served as the depository for their used condoms.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009) – This classic tale of kidnapping for a ransom comes from director J Blakeson (The 5th Wave)…This was his feature film debut, and he created a well-written and intense thriller with twists and turns aplenty… Gemma Arterton (Byzantium) plays Alice and delivers an outstanding performance as a woman walking the line between victim and heroine…Martin Compston and part-time actor, full-time chameleon, Eddie Marsan (Ray Donovan) are the kidnappers who have their hands more than full with their chosen victim…I was reminded of the delightfully awkward elements of the kidnapping in Fargo…As I watched the inherent bumbling that takes place in this gritty and presumably rather realistic amateur kidnap scenario…And their captive…As the story progresses…She starts in a box marked fear…Climbs out to a place called anger…And from there…She eventually summons the resolve needed to find her way to survival.
Monsters (2010) – Gareth Edwards (Godzilla) wrote and directed this story about a not too distant future…Where we are told…Alien lifeforms have infected a quarantined section of Mexico….Now I say told, because the director deftly applies restraint and waits to reveal them to us until the final act…Scoot McNairy (Argo), plays a photojournalist who heads into the quarantine zone to find his boss’ daughter…He is tasked with returning her to the safety of the United States…The film was shot in six weeks, and had no real script to speak of…Edwards had moments of dialogue that he wanted to reach, but let the actors improv their way to them…It made the relationship between McNairy, and Whitney Able who portrayed Sam, feel so organic…It’s as if you’re watching two people who were getting to know each other, and eventually falling in love…And in fact, it turns out that we were…Because, Able and McNairy have been married since they finished filming this gem.
Frozen (2010) – Right before the first sequel to his awesome slasher throwback, Hatchet was released…Adam Green wrote and directed this very simple…Very frightening film…At the end of a day of skiing in New England…Three friends convince the lift operator to let them take one last run…They find themselves stuck on the lift, when the lift operator gets called away…And that folks is when they say…Shit got real…One of the friends decides to jump down…Let’s just say…Without too much spoiling…It probably didn’t work out the way he wanted it to…But it does shine a big, bright, scary light on the additional threat of hungry-ass wolves who are dying to eat…Um, I mean meet…Nope, I was right the first time…Eat the two remaining skiers…I remember when this film first came out…All the little hater-trolls were clamoring over how this film wasn’t even scary…Each time that I re-watch this film…I like to imagine those trolling ass-hats stuck on the lift…Freezing their fucking taints off…Above a circling pack of predators…And the whole time…Yeah, that’s right folks…I’m fucking humming “Hungry Like the Wolf.”
Backcountry (2014) – This is the impressive-as-hell feature film debut of Adam MacDonald (Pyewacket)…And once you’re in it…The tension gets going, and never lets up…Not for a single fucking second…This is a story about Alex and his girlfriend, Jenn…Played by Missy Peregrym…Who turned in a brilliant performance…So here’s the scoop…They are a couple of urbanites camping in the Canadian wilderness…And for the first half of this tightly wound little beast of a movie…Alex makes a series of really bad decisions that get them completely lost…Men! Pfft…Typical…Am I right, ladies?!?…Anyway…This is a delightfully organic horror movie…The only threats are the known unknown…No boogey men…No ghosts…No demons…Nope…Just a really fucking huge bear…In this intense pulse-pounding story, the villainous bear is not enhanced by science, or mutated by the environment…Nope…He’s just enormous…And totally fucking hangry.
Curve (2015) – I was genuinely surprised by this simple little survival horror film…I found the performances of Julianne Hough and Teddy Sears and the well written script by Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson were what made it work…Such is the case with a minimal cast…Without the performances and the story…It’s nothing…The story is simple and taut…Mallory picks up Christian, a drifter whose sweet demeanor turns sour rather quickly…And, in an attempt to survive a dangerous life or death situation, she propels herself into an even more dangerous life or death situation…I never hear anyone talk about this hidden jewel…And that’s just another reason to recommend this psychotic little road trip to you.
Hush (2016) – This intense and original nail biter of a home-invasion flick tells the story of Maddie, played to perfection by Kate Siegel, who co-wrote the film with her husband Mike Flanagan…Recently…The couple teamed up again for the amazing Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House…In this film…Siegel portrays a woman who has lost her hearing and must somehow try and survive a home invasion…Man, that was such an unsettling element that these two artfully added to the film…You cannot hear your attacker approaching…And you cannot hear yourself making a shit-ton of noise while trying to hide…Holeee Sheepshit…That really ended up taking the film to a much higher tension level than I was prepared for…But through it all…As the psychotic intruder, played by John Gallagher Jr. (The Belko Experiment)…Is killing the handful of people that surround this woman’s rural home…Maddie does almost as impressive a job in striking back at her assailant…As she does at completely fucking things up along the way.
Creep 2 (2017) – For fans of the first film in this franchise…This was a welcomed sequel…Especially because it was once again directed by Patrick Brice…And once again written by Brice, and the titular Creep himself, Mark Duplass…In this second installment, Josef now goes by the name, Aaron, and has offered $1,000 to a videographer to record him for the day…Enter Sara, played by Desiree Akhavan (who went on to write and direct The Miseducation of Cameron Post)…Sara has a YouTube series called Encounters, where she films strange friendships with strange people she meets on Craigslist…And because that isn’t a dangerous enough career choice…She has chosen to have Aaron/Josef be her finale…Hey folks…This was a damn fine sequel…But it also stands alone as a killer found footage horror…And there are talks of making this franchise a trilogy…To which I say…Bring it the fuck on.
Gerald’s Game (2017) – Ol’ Mike Flanagan is at it again…And in top form…Adapting a novel from Stephen King that for many years was deemed “unadaptable…” But he got the seal of approval from The Master of the Macabre himself…So much so…That he was also given the job of adapting his follow-up to The Shining…Doctor Sleep…But anyway…In this one…Flanagan cast Carla Gugino in the powerful lead role of Jessie Burlingame…Who for a short time in this film shares the screen with Bruce Greenwood…Until his untimely exit…And then this is a film about a woman handcuffed to a bed…Alone except for her dead husband, a stray dog…And a whole host of images, experiences, and visitors that one cannot really be sure of how tangible any of them are…But one thing is for sure…Most, if not all of them…Are scary as fuck.
The Video Store Clerk 